A Petition to Sony Interactive Entertainment and PlayStation

To Sony Interactive Entertainment and the PlayStation leadership team,

We, the undersigned PlayStation players, collectors, retailers, preservationists, and longtime supporters, respectfully ask PlayStation to make a clear, long-term commitment to physical video games and disc-based PlayStation consoles.

Digital gaming has become an important part of the industry, and we recognize the convenience it provides. We are not asking PlayStation to move away from digital games.

We are asking PlayStation to preserve our choice.

For millions of players, a physical PlayStation game is more than another way to install software. It represents ownership, collecting, sharing, gifting, trading, lending, preservation, and decades of PlayStation history.

Physical Games Give Players Choice

Players should be able to decide how they purchase and maintain their game libraries.

Some prefer digital downloads. Others prefer physical discs. Many use both.

These options can coexist.

A future in which games become exclusively digital removes an important choice from consumers and places an increasingly large portion of a player's library within a digital ecosystem.

Physical games allow players to lend games to friends and family, give games as gifts, purchase pre-owned titles, sell or trade games they no longer want, build collections, and continue enjoying older generations of games long after their original release.

Physical Games Are Part of PlayStation's Identity

From the original PlayStation to PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5, physical games have documented the history of the platform.

Millions of us remember walking into a store and seeing shelves filled with PlayStation games.

We remember opening a new game for the first time.

We remember borrowing games from friends, hunting for older titles, discovering inexpensive used games, collecting special editions, and watching our shelves slowly become a physical timeline of the games we loved.

Those cases, discs, manuals, steelbooks, collector's editions, and midnight releases became part of gaming culture.

A physical collection can survive for decades. It can be displayed, revisited, shared, sold, traded, or passed down to another generation.

We want future PlayStation players to have that opportunity too.

Physical Media Helps Preserve Video Game History

Games are art, entertainment, technology, and cultural history.

As the video game industry grows older, preservation becomes increasingly important.

Digital storefronts can change. Licensing agreements can expire. Games can be delisted. Servers can eventually shut down.

Physical media provides another layer of preservation and gives consumers an additional way to maintain access to the games they purchased.

No preservation method is perfect, and modern physical games may still require updates or online components. But that is not an argument for eliminating physical media.

It is an argument for making physical releases better.

Whenever technically possible, we encourage PlayStation and its publishing partners to place complete, playable versions of games on physical discs rather than treating the disc merely as a license or download key.

Physical Games Support an Entire Community

Physical gaming supports far more than collectors.

It supports local game stores, independent retailers, used-game businesses, online sellers, conventions, gaming communities, collectors, archivists, and people who simply enjoy discovering games on a shelf.

The secondhand market also makes gaming more accessible.

Not everyone can afford to purchase every game at full price. Used games, sales, trades, and borrowing allow more people to participate in the PlayStation ecosystem.

Physical media creates an economy and culture that cannot be fully replicated by a download button.

Digital and Physical Can Exist Together

This petition is not asking PlayStation to reject the future.

We are asking PlayStation not to erase part of its past while building that future.

Continue improving the PlayStation Store.

Continue offering digital-only consoles for players who want them.

Continue developing subscription services and new ways to access games.

But alongside those options, please continue producing PlayStation consoles capable of playing physical games and physical editions of major PlayStation releases.

Give consumers the choice.

What We Are Asking PlayStation to Commit To

We respectfully ask Sony Interactive Entertainment and PlayStation to:

1. Continue offering PlayStation consoles with physical disc drives in future hardware generations.
2. Continue releasing major first-party PlayStation games physically alongside digital editions whenever practical.
3. Encourage third-party publishers to continue supporting physical PlayStation releases.
4. Avoid making physical editions nothing more than download keys whenever the complete playable game can reasonably fit on the physical media.
5. Continue supporting backward compatibility and access to physical PlayStation libraries whenever technically feasible.
6. Recognize physical game collectors as an important part of the PlayStation community.
7. Provide consumers with meaningful choice between physical and digital ownership rather than moving toward a digital-only ecosystem.

This Is About More Than Discs

PlayStation has existed for more than three decades.

Some of us have been here since the original PlayStation.

Others started with PS2, PS3, PS4, or PS5.

And somewhere right now, someone is opening their first PlayStation game.

We want that experience to exist for the next generation too.

A digital library is convenient.

A physical collection tells a story.

Every case on a shelf can represent a Christmas morning, a birthday, a midnight launch, a game played with a childhood friend, a difficult boss finally defeated, a rare game discovered years later, or simply a world we weren't ready to leave.

Please don't make those experiences relics of PlayStation's past.

Technology will continue to evolve. PlayStation should evolve with it.

But progress does not have to mean removing choice.

Sony and PlayStation: keep physical games alive.

Keep the disc drive.

Keep games on disc.

Keep collecting possible.

Preserve player choice.

For the players of today, and for the players who will discover PlayStation tomorrow. r/PlaystationCollectors

#KeepPlayStationPhysical